The World Wide Web (“Web” or “Internet”) provides a simple mechanism, called an image map or ISMAP, for linking two-dimensional spatial data (e.g., images) to related symbolic information such as Universal Resource Locators (URLs). Image maps are a simple technology that link simple polygonal regions within images, often referred to as hotspots (e.g., a graphically defined area in an image), to the locations of data objects on the Internet via a hyperlink. Web image maps currently are the standard mechanism used for creating graphically attractive user interfaces to Web pages. For example, an image could be made into an image map by assigning hotspots to each region of interest on the image. Unfortunately, the standard polygon-based ISMAP technology used in most Web image map systems can only work with simple polygon maps, and becomes either intolerably slow or totally unusable for mapping high-resolution images with large numbers of irregularly shaped objects, such as, for example, objects in the medical anatomy image data which comprise the National Library of Medicine's Visible Human Project.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,847,604, which is hereby expressly incorporated by reference, describes a method and apparatus to provide additional information concerning a feature of a displayed image by pointing to the location of the feature. The U.S. Pat. No. '604 provides for the correlation of particular locations in the image with the additional information for two-dimensional images. A need exists to provide such correlation for multidimensional images.